A trove of important papers that shed new light on a critical era.
Ronald Reagan and his advisers wage a twilight struggle with a decaying Soviet Union—and each other—in this fascinating documentary history.
Was the 40th president a warmonger or a peacemaker? Both sides of that debate will find support in this collection of newly declassified White House papers from the 1980s. Saltoun-Ebin, a researcher at the Reagan Presidential Library, assembles minutes of National Security Council meetings where Reagan and his top cabinet officers and aides hashed out a line on the Soviets, personal letters in which Reagan and Soviet leaders lectured and prodded one another and transcripts of key summit discussions between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the great geopolitical thaw. These documents, illuminated by the editor’s helpful explanatory notes, describe a long ideological journey: Reagan enters office a fervent Cold War warrior—“The Soviets have spoken as plainly as Hitler did…they speak world domination”—pressing for military buildup and stiff sanctions to strangle the Russian economy; he leaves inking breakthrough nuclear arms-control agreements. The documents display Reagan’s cogent grasp of policy and his nose for evolving possibilities. They also demonstrate the importance of his visionary idealism; one of the book’s revelations is how decisively his Strategic Defense Initiative, which he envisioned sharing with the Soviets in a bid to abolish all nuclear weapons, shaped American policy. (Whether SDI, which was rabidly opposed by the Soviets, curtailed or prolonged the Cold War is a question not entirely settled here.) Most of all, the documents are a vivid record of high-level statecraft. We see clashing egos and emotional outbursts—“We can’t be supplicants crawling, we can’t look like failures,” the President agonizes while pondering nuclear talks—at the NSC; we listen as Reagan and Gorbachev fence and fume while subtly edging toward crucial diplomatic compromises. Scholars will find this collection an invaluable resource, and interested lay readers will be captivated by its portrait of Reagan and other leaders grappling with history.
A trove of important papers that shed new light on a critical era.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453633052
Page Count: 480
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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